Quadrics QsNetII Interconnect

3.1 QM500 Host Bus Adapter (HBA)
The QM500, shown in Figure 1-3, is a high performance network interface card,
based on the Quadrics Elan communications device. Figure 3-1 shows the card.
Figure 3-1: QM500 Host Bus Adapter (HBA) PCI Card
Each node in a cluster requires at least one QM500. The card provides a single
high speed link for connection to an interconnect switch card port. The QM500 is a
Universal, short, 64-bit PCI X card which conforms to PCI X 1.0 standard and has
the following features:
• 100 MHz dedicated I/O processor.
• 8 Kbytes of onboard cache and 64 Mbytes of SDRAM.
• MMU with hardware tablewalk and 16 entry TLB.
• DMA engine.
• Byte wide, 400 MHz bidirectional links.
• 0.5 Mbytes of flash memory.
See Chapter 5 for more information on installation, operation, and maintenance
of the QM500.
3.2 Interconnect Enclosure and Configuration Options
Using a QM542 (3X-CM5A0) midplane, you can fully populate the interconnect
enclosure with QM511C switch card modules. In this configuration, a single
interconnect enclosure can support a cluster of up to 128 nodes, each fitted with a
QM500 network adapter. Various combinations of QM511C and QM511L switch
cards are used to create clusters from 16 nodes to 128 nodes. Alternatively you
can configure the interconnect as a federated switch for use in networks with
more than 128 nodes.
On both sides of the interconnect enclosure are four slots for switch cards and one
central slot for a QM503 controller card. A QM511C switch card has 16 link ports.
The link format is byte-wide in each direction. Slots not occupied by QM511C
modules must be filled with QM511L modules. These have no link ports, but are
necessary to complete the top stage of the fat tree topology.
3-2 128-Port Interconnect Modules